Death toll hidden beneath devastation

THE number of dead in Japan is likely to exceed 10,000 in the worst hit area alone, according to its police chief, but the toll remains far from certain.

13 March 2011Tim Dick

THE number of dead in Japan is likely to exceed 10,000 in the worst hit area alone, according to its police chief, but the toll remains far from certain.

While the earthquake's official count was listed last night at about 800, and some government agencies pushed it beyond 1000, the chief of Miyagi prefecture police, Naoto Takeuchi, said he had ''no doubt'' it would pass 10,000 in his area, according to Japan's national broadcaster, NHK.

His area was the hardest hit on Friday by the tsunami caused by the quake, now listed as magnitude 9 by Japanese officials, with waves between 3 and 10 metres high spreading as far as 10 kilometres inland.

The official toll does not include many hundreds of bodies yet to be counted, nor the enormous number of missing people.

About 10,000 remain ''unaccounted for'' in a single town: Minamisanriku, a fishing and tourist haven of 17,000 people, on the coast 102 kilometres west of the epicentre.

It was hit by a 10-metre wave about 10 minutes after the earthquake struck, which left only a handful of its buildings standing in any sense and a minority of its people in shelters. The five-storey hospital had water up to its fourth floor and, after it receded, there was almost nothing left around it but destruction and mud.

Survivors at a school used chalk to write their message on a dirt playground: ''SOS'', The Washington Post reported, while in nearby Kesennuma an elderly woman told NHK how she took refuge in a stranger's house. ''Water still came up to the second floor, and before our eyes, the house's owner and his daughter were flushed away. We couldn't do anything. Nothing.''

In another town, Rikuzentakata, between 300 and 400 bodies were reported, but officials have counted only 5900 out of its usual 23,000 population as being in shelters. About 5000 of its homes were submerged.

In the worst hit large city, Sendai, 300 bodies were found on a beach, while two other nearby cities have about 100 bodies each in gymnasiums serving as morgues.

Circumstances for survivors are bleak. At least 380,000 people are sheltering in about 2000 evacuation centres. One count had more than 20,800 homes and buildings listed as destroyed.

A young woman in Sendai told Reuters it was like a scene from a disaster movie. ''Everything is so hard now,'' she said.

Across the area, 2.5 million homes are without power, 1.4 million are without running water, and 879,000 without phones. Food and gas supplies are short and officials are pleading with shops to remain open. The Ministry of Finance said it was too soon to estimate the economic damage, although Toyota, Nissan and Honda have all suspended manufacturing.

Photographs gave some degree of precision to the uncertainty: entire villages swept away, ships deposited onto rooftops, and an F-16 fighter jet belonging to the air force was washed into the side of a building. A truck driver, Koichi Takairin, told the BBC the wave was ''unbelievably fast''. ''Smaller cars were being swept around me. All I could do was sit in my truck,'' he said.

The earthquake is the world's biggest since the Sumatran quake caused the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004.